[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 108276] New: UI for grey lines in Format Cells/ Border allows illogical and confusing settings

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108276

            Bug ID: 108276
           Summary: UI for grey lines in Format Cells/Border allows
                    illogical and confusing settings
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: 5.3.3.2 release
          Hardware: x86 (IA32)
                OS: Windows (All)
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: Calc
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: timbacontent at gmail.com

Description:
The UI for Formatting Cells/Borders forces the user to toggle through border
states that do nothing, make no sense, waste clicks, and seem as if they should
make sense, causing the learning curve in the user's mind to be corrupted.

Steps to Reproduce:
All of the steps are also in the attached spreadsheet for easier reproduction.

observe: no borders are present in this spreadsheet
1. select Cell B2 (or any other cell)
2. Choose Format Cells/Borders
3. Click on the display where the top (or any other) border is shown
observe: first a thin black line is shown, then a thicker grey line, then no
line – it's a 3-state cycle

BUG: The thicker grey line is meaningless in this case. The grey line is
supposed to mean that in a multi-cell selection, some of the boundaries have
borders and others do not, but clicking to make it grey makes no sense

4. set the border to the thick grey line anyway and okay the dialog 
observe: no border appears – I guess this is right, but it further highlights
the fallacy of allowing the user to set the border to grey.

THE CORE PHILOSOPHICAL SOFTWARE UI DESIGN PROBLEM: Users' brains try to intuit
how a program works based on what it shows them. Calc is full of this kind of
thing – where the UI is cluttered with details that seem like they should do
something but don't, resulting in confused and frustrated users.


Actual Results:  
see steps

Expected Results:
User should not be presented with UI choices that don't do anything, confuse
the user, and force extra clicks


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-bugs/attachments/20170601/7f633a2c/attachment.html>